Re: Non-linear / full-2d writing systems?

On Wednesday, May 11, 2005, at 11:22 , H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 12:13:14AM -0700, Sai Emrys wrote:
>> On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 06:56:21AM +0100, Ray Brown wrote:
> [...]
>>> Carving in relief around the cylinder - not strictly 2d, but certainly
>>> not
>>> 3d in the sense Teoh was using it. We don't use the full cross section
>>> of
>>> the pole.
>>
>> Why not? Except for the fact that there's the limit of each side not
>> being allowed to be (diameter) depth simultaneously, I don't see it as
>> any different from a wrapped bas-relief carving. And that I would
>> consider to be a pretty straightforward example of a (potentially)
>> full-3d medium. (Of course one can still impose limits on the bounds
>> of allowable depth, etc.)
>
> There is a difference between "full 3D" in the sense I'm using it, and
> in the sense you're using it.
Hee, hee - I knew HST would not agree with Sai    :D

[snip]

Oh dear, I'm probably going to get hit in the friendly cross-fire, but ...
.

> What I have in mind, however, involves "ink" that is drawn into a 3D
> grid of voxels,
voxels? I assume -els is 'elements' just as it is in pixels. But what is
the vox- ? Looks like Latin for "voice". If so, there's another difference
between your HST's schemes ans Sai's as I understand it.

> in a way that every 3D point can be inked or not. Each
> voxel can potentially have a different color, and regions of the same
> color can intertwine in a fully 3D manner that is impossible to
> represent in 2D alone.
Fair enough - but how is that different from 3d chess, which you seem to
have dismissed as not really 3d? One plays standard chess on a 8 x 8 grid
of 64 cells. Presumably, that is accepted as fully 2d? So if one plays on
a grid of 8 x 8 x 8 cells (or even something simpler like the 8 x 8 x 5
game) how is that not fully 3d? _All_ the 512 (or 384) cells are fully
usable, and the threats posed by different pieces certainly intertwine.

Puzzled.

[snip]
> [...]
>> *nod* I think the crux of it is that our paradigm of stories depend on
>> information control. With a situation where you can see the punchline
>> from the beginning (if such a term could apply), you'd need a very
>> very different way of maintaining tension, rather than just
>> withholding information until later on in the story. Or you'd need to
>> cast aside the desire for tension in your stories. :-P
> [...]
>
> I think, in 2D writing, storytelling would not so much be a matter of
> tension-and-release, but instead a matter of visual and aesthetic
> beauty in the resulting layout and in the manner in which the various
> elements are presented.
That might be all very well for some sorts of poetry - but not exactly
exciting for a story!
[snip]

> .... This is metaphoric speaking, of course, the
> idea being that rather than using sequence of presentation to produce
> tension, which is dependent on temporal sequence of reading, one uses
> the paradigm of challenge and solution: "here are the pieces to the
> puzzle (story), can you put them together? can you see what the result
> would be?"
Sounds similar to the idea I put forward when I wrote:
" Would it not be possible for the punchline only to be conceptualized
when the person has a full grasp of the whole 2d presentation? Forming the
story from the 2d representation would be perhaps a process like Platonic
dialectic. When this is complete the punchline comes like the 'blinding
flash of enlightenment' that Plato seems to think will be the philosopher'
s reward for following the dialectic path"

But surely 'challenge' and 'solution' imply temporal sequencing, do they
not? If there's no (or very little) time between the challenge and the
solution, then there's hardly any puzzle, metaphoric or otherwise, and
hence hardly any story.
======================================================

On Thursday, May 12, 2005, at 05:40 , Sai Emrys wrote:

>> Tension and release is essentially a temporal (i.e. linear) phenomenon:
>> when there is no temporal direction, there cannot be tension before
>> release, simply because there is no unique "before" or "after".
>
> There is: the timeline of reading / understanding. Any
> non-trivial-size writing (or communication in general) will require
> time to understand (unless you already know it, of course). So it is
> at least theoretically possible to play with that progression itself.
Exactly! If the story is to be worth 'reading' (if that is the right term
for comprehending something non-linear), then a timeline for the 'puzzle
solution'/ dialectic progression (or however you wish to describe it) is
inevitable IMO.

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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